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TIL The US Government Secretly Contaminated U.S. Cities in the 1950s-1960s

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via reddit.com

16l78 TIL Scarlet Fever still exists and it's strep throat with a rash...
8e448 TIL about a Frenchman named Tarrare, who was a French showman, soldier and spy known for an unusually large appetite. He could eat live animals, quarter of a bullock in a day, he was suspected of eating a one year old toddler while in the hospital. Finally died of exudative diarrhea and tuberculosis
4Xe5R TIL during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, police arrested armed civilians defending Koreatown instead of nearby looters, and police and the National Guard would often protect the suburbs far away from the riot areas, whose businesses were largely left to burn
QJYGE TIL In the U.S., 30% to 40% of the entire food supply is thrown away, worth $161 billion (or 133 billion pounds of food) in 2010. Wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal land fills
E164x TIL that one controversial scene in Hitchcock's Psycho was when Marion flushed the money down the toilet because "no flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream film and television in the United States at that time".